Education: The Voice

(2 of 2)

In the midst of his work, Diderot and his colleagues began to attack both state and church ("We must put theology to the sword," Diderot once exclaimed). To them, Reason was man's best guide, and even simple word definitions were apt to turn into political harangues. Defining Menace, Diderot lashed out at government by describing the "menace" of administrative stupidity. Under College, the encyclopedia attacked Jesuit control of education. Under Almshouses, it trumpeted some social philosophy: "It would be far more important to work at the prevention of misery than to multiply places of refuge for the miserable."

"We Will Appear." Diderot, never out of trouble for long, was imprisoned, denounced as a cacouac (savage), damned by both Parlement and Pope. He was even secretly censored by his own publisher, and he was well along in the Ss before he angrily discovered that his proofs had been "mutilated, truncated, hacked up and dishonored."

But Diderot went right on, and finally after 25 years ("We will appear, come wind and high water!"), his job was finished. "If one adds to those years of our life which have passed since we first projected this work," he wrote to a friend, "those years which we have given to its execution, you will easily realize that we have lived more than remain yet to live out. But we will have obtained the recompense which we await from our contemporaries and our posterity, if we make them one day say that we have not lived in vain." Last week, 200 years later, Frenchmen were trying to say just that.